Abstract or Summary

This study presents a psychoanalytic approach to learning using Lacan’s four-discourses model, considered in the light of Badiou’s approach to truth and Hegel’s dialectic. On this account, a successful pedagogy is shown to require a “narrative capable of bringing to awareness, for further construction, things that are farthest from the mind” (Britzman 2009, p. viii). The process involves making available the unconscious drivers that place students in particular spaces within the Symbolic order by providing discursive strategies for them to access foreign parts of their selves, particularly desire and the quests for recognition and love. The essay argues that in education, the logically impossible sublation of the ‘not-all’ (pas-toute) of the feminine principle of acceptance and inclusion and the masculine principle of denial and possession corresponds to the injunction to actualise student potential in opening up the borders of what is possible in learning.